UK’s Brexit Maze

The Citizen

LONDON: On Tuesday, 22 October 2019, Parliament voted twice within half an hour on the Withdrawal Agreement Bill to leave the European Union. While there was a majority on the “principle” of Brexit, just 15 minutes later MPs stopped the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, leaving the EU by his arbitrary deadline of 31 October. Brexit postponed. Parliament had wrested control of the agenda from the government, along with the freedom to amend the bill, including a possible confirmatory People’s Vote. Boris Johnson’s Brexit government does not want a confirmatory referendum, fearing it might overturn the result of the June 2016 referendum, in which the UK voted to leave. 

What the MPs told the Prime Minister in those two votes, an old colleague put it this way –

“Yes, maybe, but we would need more time and probably some changes.” The government wanted Parliament to pass the entire bill within three days.  

So, the United Kingdom was back to the mechanism to request the EU for an extension of the Article 50 notification until 31 January 2020, as required by a law known as the Benn Act. The extension has just been granted. The Prime Minister, meanwhile, wants an election. However, in the middle of Parliament’s current five-year term, it requires a two-thirds majority to hold an early general election. In recent days, cracks have opened up in the opposition, with the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish Nationalists in Parliament pushing for a December election, but on a date which the Prime Minister does not find advantageous to him. The country is therefore in an immensely complicated constitutional and legal maze. To try to understand what is going on, a step-by-step look at events is necessary.  

Just three days before, in a rare sitting on Saturday, 19 October – the first in 37 years – the House of Commons had passed an opposition amendment to the Prime Minister’s motion on leaving the EU. The amendment said: “… this House has considered the matter but withholds approval unless and until implementing legislation is passed.” 

It was remarkable. The amendment was introduced by a veteran MP and former Conservative minister, Oliver Letwin, who had been expelled with 20 other lawmakers from the governing party. Opposition MPs, with few exceptions, supported him. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a flamboyant, overconfident politician, had introduced his plan to force through Brexit legislation in three days despite being in a minority of minus 43 in Parliament. He asserted that it was the executive’s prerogative to run the country; MPs were there to facilitate it. Johnson’s calculation was that the divided opposition would never unite. He had misjudged. 

Against the government’s wishes, the Letwin amendment won. MPs supporting it argued that they needed more time to go through nearly 600 pages of the draft Brexit agreement in a matter of hours after they were given the document. They wanted to avoid a no-deal exit that would be very disruptive, economically and logistically, for an island state surrounded by the European Union. And the Prime Minister’s “do or die” deadline of 31 October was too tight to be realistic. 

So, the United kingdom is in the midst of a mighty battle for sovereignty between Parliament and the executive, and Parliament has been winning – so far. As MPs debated on 19 October, huge crowds took part in London streets in a “People’s March” against Brexit. German TV estimated that there were as many as 2.2 million protestors. 

Even before that day, Prime Minister Johnson’s government had suffered six defeats in Parliament. When he tried to shut down Parliament, he lost in the UK Supreme Court (11-0) and in Scotland’s highest court. The case remains open in the Scottish court until, as the judge said, it was clear that the obligations under the legislation had been “complied with in full”. 

Boris Johnson continues to insist he would not resign even though he is 43 MPs short of a majority in the House of Common. His government is dysfunctional, because it cannot get its legislative programme through. Anger, frustration and a deepening sense of crisis exist in the country. A number of seemingly unanswerable questions arise. How does Boris Johnson’s minority government survive? Can the opposition in Parliament not bring a no-confidence motion in his government and force it out? Why can new elections not take place? Why Parliament seems indecisive and reluctant to go for a clear break from the European Union? 

Such questions look simple, but answers are very complicated. Many MPs appreciate the complications while voters necessarily do not.  

The origins of this Brexit crisis go back to 2014 when Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative Party suffered significant setbacks in the European Parliamentary elections, coming third behind the Brexiteers of the UK Independence Party and the main opposition Labour Party. At the time, Cameron was in coalition with the pro-EU Liberal Democrats. The coalition’s economic austerity was increasingly unpopular. Welfare cuts, low wage rises and falling living standards were causing strong resentment against immigrants from the other 27 European Union countries taking advantage of the EU’s freedom of movement and legally present in the United Kingdom to work, study and live – as a million or more UK citizens were legally resident in other EU member-states. 

To shore up anti-EU Conservative supporters who had abandoned the party in large numbers, Cameron proposed a referendum if the Conservative Party won an outright majority in the next general election due in 2015. Until then, he knew that his coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats, would veto any such plan. Cameron was overconfident of winning the public vote to stay in the EU, and that, he thought, would be the end of his problems. The Conservative Party, somewhat unexpectedly, won the 2015 election by a small but clear majority. Cameron proceeded to hold an advisory, nonbinding referendum in June 2016, as he had promised in his manifesto. 

His decision backfired fantastically. Despite Cameron’s optimism, the electorate voted to leave the European Union by a small margin. It was the end of his political career. The Leave campaign was greatly emboldened. And the crisis has since been intensifying. Cameron’s successor as prime minister, Theresa May, has come and gone. 

Just as the governing party, opposition parties are not very functional either when it comes to removing Johnson’s minority government. The biggest opposition party is Labour, but its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, is seen as a hard left politician who has tolerated antisemitism. It is an accusation he denies. But many in his own and other parties refuse to accept Corbyn as an alternative prime minister, and he cannot command a majority in Parliament. Many opposition MPs are also against an early election for three main reasons. First, Boris Johnson is already making it a choice of People vs. Parliament. Second, those who represent constituencies which voted to leave the EU may lose their seats. And third, a general election is much more than delivering Brexit, because it is about electing a government that must work to deliver a wider policy agenda. 

So, an opposition that cannot agree on a strategy to remove the current Prime Minister and replace him with one of its own would rather let a dysfunctional minority government stay in office, and see it make mistakes almost every day. A phrase often heard from opponents is “Let them stew in their own juice”. Granting Boris Johnson an early election is not most of his opponents’ preference. 

Predictions are risky. But even if the United Kingdom does leave the European Union, the next stage will be even longer and more complicated. The UK will need to decide what kind of economic, political and strategic relationship it should have with the rest of Europe that surrounds it. New free trade agreements will have to be negotiated with the EU and the rest of the world. What will it mean? Five years, ten years or more splitting joint assets and negotiating a new trading relationship with the EU.

Competing pressures from different nations to change standards, laws and regulations, including, for example, chlorinated chicken from the United States. And demands for preferential treatment on visas for citizens of other countries like India. As the Atlantic magazine recently commented, “Brexit is forever”.   


Book Review: Me the People: How Populism Transforms Democracy

New York Journal of Books

















Book Review: How Democracy Ends

New York Journal of Books

Since the days of Athenian democracy two and a half millennia ago, the idea of “rule of the people” has acquired many versions. Under the extraordinary system of governance in the fifth to fourth century BCE, all male citizens of Athens had equal political rights, took part in direct democracy, lived by the decisions they themselves made, and by random selection were chosen to serve in the institutions that governed them.

Today, direct democracy is rare, replaced in most countries by a version of democracy whereby citizens, male and female, elect their representatives who govern on their behalf.

The collapse of Soviet communism heralded a new democratic spring in countries which had been under Moscow’s domination. But whereas democracy blossomed in Europe as the 20th century came to an end, the Arab Spring in the new century proved short-lived before it was crushed.

These examples inform us about the power as well as fragility of democracy.

Recent events in the United States, a number of European countries and India have raised serious doubts about the health of democracy even in the most advanced nations.

Potentially illegal data collection, targeting specific groups to influence them to vote in a certain way, and widespread suspicions of Russian interference in the American and European elections have poisoned the environment. Trust in public institutions and their ability to ensure free and fair elections has been a major casualty. Warnings are rife that democracy as a system of governance is under threat. Are we approaching the end of democracy? It is a question increasingly being asked.

How Democracy Ends

David Runciman, professor of politics at Cambridge University, raises the same question in his new book How Democracy Ends (Basic Books, 2018). Since his PhD thesis, which came out as Pluralism and the Personality of the State (CUP, 1997), Runciman has published several books about plurality in political systems and the crisis of trust in democracies.

The publication of How Democracy Ends coincides with a particularly turbulent period for Western democracies. Runciman describes it as democracy’s midlife crisis. Various democratic societies are at different points in their lives. But there is compelling evidence that the future is going to be different.

The book, saturated with information, is a study of the decline of democracy after its most successful century. Runciman explores the factors that make the current crisis unlike those democracy has faced when it was younger.

First, he maintains that “political violence is not what it was for earlier generations, either in scale or character.” Western societies are “fundamentally peaceful societies, which means that our most destructive impulses manifest themselves in other ways.”

Second is the change in the threat of catastrophe. Whereas the prospect of disaster once tended to produce a “galvanizing effect” on people to take action, now the effect is “stultifying”—a condition in which it all seems futile.

Third, the information technology revolution has made us dependent on communication and information-sharing which we cannot control or understand.

With these suppositions, Runciman has organized his work around three themes endangering democracy: coup, catastrophe, and technological takeover. His insights into challenges that confront democracies today are compelling. His suggestion that the threat to them is not from outside, but from subversion and power grab within is intriguing.

That populism breeds in democratic societies when conditions of economic distress, technological change and growing inequality exist is evident, though the absence of war is among those conditions is questionable. Attrition and low-level conflict do afflict democracies. And democracies have shown a propensity to go and fight wars abroad.

Catastrophe can strike in one of many forms. Runciman writes that “modern civilization could destroy itself by weapons of mass destruction, by poisoning itself or it could allow itself to be infected by evil.” Climate change, artificial intelligence or technological advances resulting in extensive calamity if technology falls under the control of ruthless individuals—all threaten us.

That the power of computers by pressing a button could bring the end of democracy no longer belongs to science fiction. Robots could wreak havoc in our societies if they fell into the wrong hands. Humans might not be able to stop robots once such machines went on a destructive spree.

As Runciman puts it in the final section of his book, the appeal of modern democracy is that it offers dignity to its inhabitants with an expectation that their views will be taken seriously by politicians. And it delivers long-term benefits. But with rapid changes taking place in societies at different stages of development, what alternatives are there to twentieth century democratic systems?

The author presents three models in the end. First, Chinese-type pragmatic authoritarianism which offers personal benefits underwritten by the state, but at the cost of opportunities of self-expression. Second, epistocracy, the rule of the knowers, arguing that the right to take part in political decision-making depends on whether you know what you are doing. The model is directly opposed to democracy in which each citizen has equal rights.

Third, societies offering liberation by technology—societies in which some people, those who can afford, will try to buck death without any help from the state.


But it also brings stability and boredom and as time passes, fear that it may not continue. If it is not going to continue, what will our future be? Runciman, in this book, has made sweeping observations about democracy in the past and present. He has raised intriguing questions about the future in imaginative ways. The book is highly recommended for general readers, undergraduates and professionals.




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The United Kingdom in 2017: Divided, Scandalised and Lost

The Citizen






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Brexit Secretary David Davis









Steve Bell in the Guardian



Sex, Lies and Incompetence: Britain’s Ruling Establishment in Crisis


Photo: BBC

Barely five months after a general election in the United Kingdom, the government of Prime Minister Theresa May looks doomed. It could fall any day, next week or next month. Within her Conservative Party and elsewhere in the United Kingdom, in other European countries and beyond, speculation is rife that Theresa May’s days in office may be numbered. Scandals involving sex, lies and incompetence unfold day after day. The rot has set in at the heart of Britain’s power centre.

As the deadline for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union (March 29, 2019) approaches, rival factions in the government and the Conservative parliamentary party are engaged in fierce battles over what kind of Brexit they want. Once a Conservative Member of Parliament and now a distinguished commentator, Matthew Parris, says, “The sooner Theresa May goes, the better.”

Ministers operate like freelance diplomats and traders, not like members of a cabinet which has collective responsibility, without reference to the protocol and the Prime Minister’s Office. Claims of sexual misconduct by politicians of various parties, but more seriously by ministers, abound. Allegations of groping have ended the Defence Secretary Michael Fallon’s career, after his confession that at times his behaviour had fallen short. And the First Secretary of State (in effect deputy prime minister), Damian Green, has been accused by a much younger woman activist, Kate Maltby, of making sexual advances and sending “suggestive” text messages to her. These accounts are widely reported in the media.

Further, there are claims, backed by a former senior police officer, that pornography was discovered on Damian Green’s office computer some years ago. He denies the allegations, and the Prime Minister has ordered an investigation. But, unlike Michael Fallon, Damian Green remains in his post.

Sleaze at the heart of power goes back to the time when Theresa May’s predecessor, David Cameron, was in office. A well-known television producer, Daisy Goodwin, has alleged that she was groped by a staff member in the then Prime Minister David Cameron’s official residence. According to Goodwin, when she challenged the man who was much younger than her, he dropped his hand from her breast and laughed nervously. Ex-Prime Minister Cameron now says he is “alarmed, shocked and concerned.”


At the same time, it emerged that another minister, the International Development Secretary Priti Patel, went on “holiday” to Israel and held 12 meetings with Israeli officials, including the Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu. First, Patel said that she had informed the Foreign Office about her visit. It turned out that she had not. She apologised and was let off the hook. Then, news leaked out that she had had more meetings with Israeli officials and had not declared them. That was too much. Priti Patel was summoned back to London from a visit to Africa and left the Cabinet soon after.

Leaks also revealed that Patel had visited the occupied (Syrian) Golan Heights. She inspected an Israeli army hospital where Syrian “refugees” and anti-Assad rebels are treated. And she was in talks about ways to divert British foreign aid to the Israeli army. The United Kingdom does not recognise Israeli control in occupied Arab territories. British ministers do not visit those areas. When they do they have to maintain a strict protocol and meet Palestinian as well as Israeli officials to give the appearance of balance. The International Development Secretary broke all the rules.

Theresa May’s minority government is beset by crises of its own making. Having supported the option to stay in the European Union in the 2016 EU referendum, she has become a fervent Leaver since becoming Prime Minister. And her calculations have gone badly wrong. She called a general election in June 2017, dead certain of winning a big majority in Parliament and thereafter doing what she liked in exiting the EU and shaping the country in her own post-Brexit vision. Instead, she lost her majority in Parliament. A number of sitting MPs of her party were defeated. She snatched defeat from the jaws of victory many in her party had anticipated.

Now, she barely governs as head of a Conservative minority government. She is sustained in office by 10 MPs of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party which has promised to support her in any motion of confidence. She has bought the DUP’s support with a billion pound additional funding for Northern Ireland. But the deal has raised serious questions over the British government’s impartiality in the peace process and power-sharing between the province’s Catholic and Protestant communities that ended decades of conflict in April 1998.

In her party, Theresa May’s position is made even more precarious by about 35 hard-line MPs who would not accept any compromise in forging a new relationship with the European Union. Since triggering Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty in March 2017 to exit the European Union, she is under relentless pressure from these uncompromising anti-EU MPs to make no concessions to the other side. Whether it is about paying the exit fee to meet the UK’s commitments to current EU projects and pension liabilities etc., accepting the EU requirement of four freedoms (movement of goods, services, capital, people) in a future trade relationship or the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice for settling disputes between the UK and the EU.

A number of her MPs want the British government to simply walk away from the talks, arguing that it will be the EU that will come back to negotiate trade with the United Kingdom. Others want a soft Brexit and trading as open as possible thereafter. Still others insist that the UK must leave the EU in March 2019, and any transition arrangement must be as short as possible.

In a leaked secret letter setting out their terms of exit, the Environment Secretary, Michael Gove, and the Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, have written to the Prime Minister that after the UK ceases to be a member of the EU in March 2019, any transition period must end precisely on the last day of June 2021. Writing in the Guardian, the newspaper’s political columnist Rafael Behr called it ego-wrestling in the British cabinet. The Prime Minister can neither sack Boris Johnson nor Michael Gove, because by doing so she will risk bringing down her government.

The Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, has a history of making off-the-cough remarks, a bumbling style and public buffoonery. Currently, he is in serious trouble following his careless, and false, comments before a parliamentary select committee. Speaking about Iran and a British-Iranian dual citizen being held in jail on accusations of plotting to overthrow the Iranian government, the Foreign Secretary said that the woman was only teaching journalism there. Actually she had gone to see her elderly parents and was arrested by Revolutionary Guards as she was about to board a flight to return to Britain.

The Iranian authorities jumped on Johnson’s comments, claiming that his remarks proved that the woman was guilty, and are threatening to double her five-year jail sentence. In prison, Nazanin Zaghary-Radcliffe’s health is declining. Her daughter is being looked after by her parents while her British husband, Richard Radcliffe, battles to get them back home. For several days, Boris Johnson resisted calls to apologise for making a false statement which has caused a British family a lot of trouble. Finally, he did apologise, but the woman’s fate remains in the hands of the Iranian authorities.

So, the government of Theresa May stumbles from crisis to crisis as the United Kingdom approaches exit from the European Union, the biggest trading bloc which surrounds it.

When she succeeded David Cameron as Prime Minister in July 2016, many people had assumed that she would be a safe pair of hands. However, her actions, her dependence on a small number of advisers personally loyal to her and her inability to win the party’s and people’s confidence have proved otherwise. In the midst of scandals involving sex, lies and ineptitude at the highest level of her government, she now fights for her own political survival as Parliament scrutinises the EU Withdrawal Bill.



Religion Does Not Mean Peace

Deepak Tripathi

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.” — The Bible

“O You who believe! Enter absolutely into peace.” — The Qur’an

“Delusion is born in anger.” — The Bhagvad Gita

“Hatred will not cease by hatred, but love alone. This is the ancient law.” — The Dalai Lama

All religions have a message of peace and tolerance. So why are there conflicts involving followers of God? Maybe conflicts have little or nothing to do with religion, and violence by one against the other has another motive. What might it be?

Conflicts may seem driven by religious zealotry, or hatred against the other. Hatred based on one’s belief in cultural superiority over the other. Against minorities perceived to have amassed wealth. Or because one group thinks the other enjoys too much protection. It is often about privilege and wealth. However, wealth is frequently derived from privilege, so it is wealth in the end. Conflicts which are depicted as religious are actually about who controls how much in society.

Edward Said’s 1978 classic Orientalism is an overarching critique of the Christian West’s historical, cultural and political depiction of Islamic societies of the East. According to Said, Orientalism provides ways to rationalize interference by evoking self-serving history by portraying the targeted community as inferior and dangerous. Conflicts that acquire religious overtones often have economic objectives.

The Israel-Palestine conflict is about land and property; partition of British India in 1947 and Hindu-Muslim riots; Buddhist Sinhalese-led burning and looting of Muslim and Hindu Tamil businesses in the capital, Colombo, in 1983 that triggered a 26-year civil war. Lynching of Muslims by extremist Hindu vigilantes in India, ostensibly to protect cows from slaughter and to force a ban on eating meat.

Worse is happening in India’s eastern neighborhood. Since August 25, 2017, more than six hundred thousand mostly Muslim Rohingya refugees have fled to Bangladesh from Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. Their flight has halved the Rohingya population in Myanmar’s Rakhine State, and quadrupled the number of refugees in Bangladesh within two months.

The United Nations has described this as a crisis on a catastrophic scale. Women, children, old and infirm have given numerous accounts of murder, torture, rape and destruction of Rohingya villages by Myanmar’s military. Thousands, who are stranded, cannot escape. The United Nations and Human Rights Watch have said this is ethnic cleansing.

Rohingyas maintain that their indigenous heritage in Myanmar is over a thousand years old, bringing in Arab, Mughal and Portuguese influence. Despite this, they have suffered harsh persecution, first by Myanmar’s military junta, and now under a military-civilian ruling coalition under the de facto leadership of Aung San Suu Kyi, winner of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize “for her non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights.”

Under the 1982 Burmese nationality law, Rohingyas are denied citizenship, because they are not recognized as one of eight “national races.” Aung San Suu Kyi’s government even refuses to allow the use of the term “Rohingya” and calls them illegal immigrants.

UN investigations have found evidence of incitement of hatred by ultra-nationalist Buddhists against Rohingyas. According to the United Nations special investigator on Myanmar, Yanghee Lee, the country wants to expel the entire Rohingya population.

Amid a chorus of international criticism, Aung San Suu Kyi has very little to say. When she feels compelled to break her silence, she denies there being any refugee problem. She demands that human rights and refugee organizations not use the term “Rohingya” in their reports. In occasional conversations with foreign leaders, she has insisted that the aim of military operations in the country is to clear out terrorists. And she has claimed that the crisis is being distorted by a “huge iceberg of misinformation.

Her remarks point to government claims that a Rohingya rebel group killed a number of border guards and policemen in August. Details of those encounters are sketchy, but very different from the humanitarian crisis in the region, and the price Aung San Suu Kyi is having to pay in lost reputation.

Among those who have pleaded with Suu Kyi to intervene to stop the atrocities, or at least speak out against them, are fellow Nobel laureates, the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Malala Yousafzai. Yet Aung San Suu Kyi remains in alliance with the military which kept her in detention for fifteen years, and Buddhist ultra-nationalist groups.

Sigmund Freud had a point when he said that religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.